Joe Biden will this week sign an executive order to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.
The US president is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500.
Mayors of several US border cities are expected to be present in the White House for Biden’s announcement.
Biden’s move echoes a similar approach adopted by Donald Trump in 2018 when he was president and reverses his one-time philosophical opposition to his predecessor’s hostility to migrants. When he was a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Trump’s policy, saying it upended decades of US asylum law.
He has been forced to change course as the number of asylum seekers coming through the US-Mexico border has surged during his presidency, with opinion polls consistently showing immigration to be at or near the top of voters’ concerns, ahead of inflation and the economy.
An attempt by the White House to cobble together legislation tightening border restrictions by tying it to aid to Ukraine and Israel failed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers withdrew support, apparently at the urging of Trump, who did not want Biden to claim credit for resolving an issue he has attempted to make his own.
According to CBS, which broke the story, Biden’s executive order will enable US immigration officials to quickly deport migrants who enter the country illegally without processing their asylum claims.
Controversially, it will rely on a presidential authority known as 212 (f) which became infamous during Trump’s presidency because of its use to enforce certain immigration restrictions, including travel bans from Muslim countries.
Like Trump’s restrictions, Biden’s order is likely to face legal challenges.
Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. But the order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.
An estimated 179,000 “border encounters” were recorded in April, according to US Customs and Border Protection figures, compared with a record high of 302,000 last December. More than 3,500 migrants were said to have crossed various points along the 2,000-mile border illegally on Sunday alone.
Biden initially rolled back Trump’s restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessor’s border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.
Biden suspended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy – whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered – on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Biden’s approach following a lower court ruling against it.
When Trump’s policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying: “This is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before.”
A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Biden’s handling of the southern border.
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but Biden has been backed into a corner on this. The immigration system is fundamentally broken and not equipped to deal with modern needs, but that has to be fixed by Congress. Biden had legislation he was favoring, and regardless of what your opinion on it was, Republicans made it clear they won't let absolutely any changes to immigration happen with a Democrat in the White House, no matter how much they may agree with them.
His options under executive action are extremely limited. The strategy of letting the system flounder to illustrate the need for reform has only worked against him, so now he's trying something else. I don't agree with the current system, the reforms that he proposed, nor this executive order, but man, there just isn't a good solution here, and he's feeling the political pressure on it, which while it may be misdirected is nonetheless real.
I'm with you here. I don't like this EO, but wtf else is he supposed to do? It's the number one issue for a huge chunk of the populace. We're gonna have to do better than complaining about it to give any government official options that aren't just restrictions. People are hurting and dumb, and they blame immigrants. Solve that at the root, but you can't ignore it in the meantime.
The root of the problem is Congress. The last full overhaul of immigration policy was in 1986. Congress amended policy in 2019 and tied it to border security, focusing on protecting minors. Trump then twisted those protections into Title 42 by detaining children and deporting their parents.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/senate-bill/1200
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6
It usually is! We put way too much focus on the presidency for our woes. Thanks for the dates, that's helpful context.
Thank you. I’ve been commenting the same thing on similar posts. His power allows him three options, turn away at the border, detainment, or doing nothing. Doing nothing defaults to current immigration policy, which means migrants will be bused to overcrowded sanctuary cities to remain homeless due to lack of funding for housing.
He did the right thing by repealing Title 42. He left the border open and relied on sanctuary cities to house migrants while pressing Congress for immigration reform. Congress failed to pass a bill, and now sanctuary cities are over housing capacity. His only remaining options are turn away or detain.
Context? In my comment section?
How dare Biden try to appeal to Americans with different opinions than me.
I can see Republicans say that he shouldn't close the border or that he's not allowed.
Oh the hypocrisy!